Peek-a-Boo Style Weakness?

Training
41

I’m not sure what it is about sweet pea that you think isn’t traditional fundamentals. Good jab, back foot, crouch over rear hip. Theres nothing flashy about sweet pea’s boxing, he just liked to clown people from time to time.

In a similar vein, theres nothing about the D’amato system or tyson that makes it a bad style to try to learn. The core components are not magic juju only 1%er athletes can learn, they are good fundamentals: Strong jab, combination punching, tight defense and aggressive footwork. Jose torres certainly wasn’t an outlier.

Following this logic you might as well not teach someone proper defensive maneuvers because you might think 99% of people don’t have the athleticism to slip punches and therefore should just glue their fists to their head and hope for the best.

It’s a silly notion, you get better at something by trying to be better at something.

42

Were you advocating this style for a pro or am?

That’s why you don’t see so many similar Tyson-like fighters. That “style” takes a very unique combo of physical attributes with athletic ability. At least that’s been my experience with regional and national events over the years. Tyson boxed a tad different as an am. Same with Mayweather. But everyone wants to box like Floyd or Mike. But I do agree with you that you can take certain elements and apply it to your game. Of course. I like the slip-jab personally and the switch step.

If you can’t slip a punch, given proper instruction and practice, you should pick up another sport. Or not complete, and maybe just light spar. You will get hurt. You don’t have to be James Toney to be able to move your head. Don’t you think glueing your gloves to your head impairs your vision and can turn you into a punching bag? And many people do the Peek-a-Boo wrong. They raise their gloves way too high and it invites wicked body punches. They don’t move their feet. They will stand in front of a guy and waggle their head with the earmuffs on and they will get ripped to the liver because their body doesn’t move. Tyson’s footwork was better than his head movement. Hell, it WAS his head movement in many cases. Tyson was awesome, how many others successfully used this “style”? I just think it’s so damn hard. Maybe I’m wrong though.

43

Either or, caveat of course being that an amateur if he wants to succeed at anything past a state level will to some extent need to the play the “game” so to speak. That game being of course the tag and run style that has come to personify olympic boxing.

What I’m saying is I dont think there is anything stylistically that is too “advanced” or “fancy” for someone to take it and run with it. Rather, its that these fighters do everything so well that they make it look fancy. Floyd is another good example I suppose, I’m regurgitating what Irish said on here before, but realistically theres nothing floyd does that is unique, its just he does every thing so damn well. The shoulder roll for example is as old school as it gets.

I agree that you do need a certain set of athletic attributes to make it shine, but that could be said about anything in sports. I guess what I’m getting at is proceeding from a notion that you’re average and therefore shouldn’t try to emulate what top athletes do is just going to keep you average, nobody tries their hand at something and is instantly good at it. I used to get shitty advice like “keep your hands up” ad nauseum and was still getting my ass kicked in sparring, but I knew there was a better way of doing things so i kept practicing slipping punches and being defensively sound. Soon I was becoming really hard to hit and suddenly I had coaches telling me I was a natural talent - nice to hear but personally I think its bullshit, the harder I worked at certain skills the more “talented” I got, funny how that works :stuck_out_tongue:

44

[quote]liams8 wrote:

[quote]JMallon95 wrote:
You can buy them if need be, but to be honest with you, you’re better off making one. It makes it easier to repair and what not if anything goes wrong. When I made mine, it literally involved a plastic bag filled with a bit of sand/dirt, placed in an old gym sock and tied with a knot at the top, then connected to the ceiling by a bit of thin rope.

It’s exactly the same principle as any of the other bags that are available. You can adjust the rope length to be at head height depending on your stance, not when you’re stood upright (remember that in case you dip down slightly when you get in your stance). There’s plenty of videos on the web about how to make your own, for example: - YouTube

If not I’m sure everlast or something will make one that shouldn’t be too expensive.
[/quote]

Cheers mate, will look to make one soon.

Out of interest, you said you used to do this style, which either means:

  1. you chose a different style (if so why?)
    or
  2. You dont box anymore (if so, how far did you get with this style and if you were to give one reason as to why you couldnt utilise it as effectivly as tyson what would it be?)

Cheers
[/quote]

I had to stop boxing because I tore my ACL & MCL on my right knee during a fight. I started powerlifting because it doesn’t really involve controlling my knee under impact, which is where my issue is.

I didn’t have as many fights as I would have hoped, my record was 11-1-0 with 9 stoppages, 6 of which were knockouts.
I think my biggest issue in terms of not being able to utilise the style as well as people such as tyson, was my fitness. I had the speed, I had more than enough power in both hands, and I could move my head well, but all of these were kind of pointless to have considering I couldn’t do it for much more than two rounds effectively (thankfully few of my fights went too far).

I’d think the biggest issue people have is not focusing on head movement, which I know sounds stupid considering it is a style based on it, but people think that it involves just reacting to every punch where as it involves that and moving your head even when they’re not punching. Watch tyson’s fights and you can see that most of the time he is within firing range, he is doing some sort of head movement, no matter how small or exaggerated the movement is, he’s pre-emptively moving his head.

But yeah, trust me, you have to be conditioned to continue at that work rate, like I said in my other post, you’re working harder than everyone else to fight like this.

45

Yeah, I was just going with the thread highlighting the “weaknesses” of the Peek-a-Boo. Here is the key: how many coaches teach/advocate this style? There you have it. As a novice (or even an open fighter), if you try this you will get chased out of the gym. Now, if you are a beast how can get inside and are being successful, I can see how maybe you might EVOLVE into a type of style like this if it feeds into your strengths. It’s just very uncommon, because to make it effective, you have to be special. And I agree as stated before, footwork is key. If you like a pressure style and you have great fitness, you are far better off studying this guy:

Jeff Fenech.